My name is Maria Mahler-Haug and I am a Junior concentrating in International Relations- Global Environment.

I wrote what I realize was a pretty inexperienced article on “The Future of Journalism” last year for a journalism class at Brown. While the article itself may have been admittedly green, the research that I did for it was fascinating and left me with some big-picture questions about global media and its future place in our societies. I interviewed Steven Brill, Mark Oppenheimer, and Peter Phipps on their predictions for the future of journalism. They spoke of a more global, more encompassing media that would be a hybrid of written, oral, and visual journalism. The accredited, print journalism would be combined with the “couch-journalism” style of blogging, along with radio, and television style news. The advancement of technology would clearly enable this hybrid system to come to be, but I would like to explore some other implications of this type of new media. The same advancement of technology that would enable this hybrid system to exist may simultaneously allow the news to become more globalized. Will this technology bring the news to more people and to different social spheres? What are some international implications of a changing media? While I would like to learn about global media as it relates to international relations, I would also like to learn about the process of creating media.

I should be in this class because I have seen the effects and power of the media on a political level within the United States. I just came back from working on HRC’s campaign in New Hampshire. I jumped on a bus to Manchester after my last exam of the fall semester with the expectation that I would be permanently glued to one end of a phone line for the entirety of my internship. However, I was happily thrown into the frenzy of the New Hampshire primary countdown: demobilizing snowstorms, eager surrogate speakers, hundreds of volunteers, and of course, the press. My whole experience in New Hampshire actually had very little to do directly with the press. The most direct contact I had with the press consisted of journalists calling my campaign phone line, slyly trying to see if I knew the Senator’s schedule, or hounding me once I stepped outside the Headquarters, trying to get a feel for the atmosphere behind the guarded doors. But my experience on the campaign seemed to be very centered around the impressions that the media had created. I could see changes in the campaign’s message and focus as polls emerged, and I saw how the campaign reacted to the media’s reporting on the situation in Iowa. I saw from within the boiler room the power that the press held as AP called the primary in Hillary’s favor. I was lucky to get to see the campaign’s interaction with the media, and I think it’s a great background experience to have when examining the media’s power on a much more global level.

In “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” Roland Barthes writes that writing and speech are linked. He writes on page 320 that “it is because I have written that I speak; writing is represented by its contrary, speech.” This passage I think is particularly pertinent to global media because global media allows both the written and the spoken word to be distributed to a broad audience. Modern teaching theory talks about the three different pathways of learning: audio, visual, and kinesthetic. Global media, especially with globalization of media through new technologies, is an excellent example of providing the three pathways of learning. The media now provides visual media (both written and video), audio media, as well as opportunities for the lay person to participate in the media through blogging. In this way, the media can be viewed as “teaching”.
But Barthes gives special weight to the power of speech. He writes on page 311: “No help for it: language is always on the side of power; to speak is to exercise a will to power: in the space of speech, no innocence, no safety.” When putting this sentence in the context of global media, Barthes gives power to spoken media over written media. The fact that there is no safety behind speech almost gives speech more credibility and integrity.
However, speech in a global media setting lacks the teacher’s interaction with the audience, or the “Other”. Barthes writes on page 313 that “when the teacher speaks to his audience, the Other is always there, puncturing his discourse.” He writes that the student audience is the “exemplary Other because it seems not to be speaking—so that then, from deep in its apparent silence, it speaks all the louder in you.” This statement raises some interesting questions about global media’s audience. With no opportunity to instantaneously respond at all to the speaker or teacher in any way, is the media’s “Other” an exemplary one?